Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the main students' motivators for their migration decisions, which can be used by education managers working in the area of career management in higher education institutions of Latvia. Design/methodology/approach: Performed empirical data analysis is based on a survey data, collected from students of various educational programmes in two higher education institutions of Latvia. The data analysis consisted of three steps: initial exploratory data analysis (including testing for sample homogeneity, and sample descriptive statistics), correspondence analysis of student's answers (including testing for survey reliability, discrimination measures and dimension reduction) and analysis of relationships between survey questions (including contingency tables, testing for directional associations and the logistic regression). Findings: The results of the study show that students' career motivators are significant explanatory factors for their migration decisions. According to the survey results, the main reasons for migration decisions are better career prospects, a higher salary, new professional experience and share of own experience, new professional contacts, motivating and interesting job, better training facilities and the support of their family members and friends who are working or studying abroad. Research limitations/implications: First, the sample in this study included two higher education institutions. Second, the same respondents participated in both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the research. Future study with a more diverse student population and the refined scale items is recommended to verify and generalise the findings. Practical implications: The paper addresses policy makers at the national level and education managers responsible for career guidance activities. The conducted analysis has allowed the authors to provide some recommendations for education managers working in the area of career guidance and counselling in Latvia. However, as education managers in the Baltic states face similar challenges, the results might be also used by managers working in other Baltic states. Originality/value: The empirical study performed in the paper has attempted to investigate the influence of students' career drivers on their migration decisions in the framework of career management in higher education institutions.